


the upward movement

by constellatory



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Implied Relationships, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-07 08:34:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/746490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/constellatory/pseuds/constellatory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's not a lot to do on the meteor when you're left alone to your own devices. So sometimes, the music just starts to happen, and you think of her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the upward movement

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a friend. Never will I not imply Jade/Dave. You're free to imagine Dave/Karkat, too, I won't hold it against you.

Sometimes it gets real quiet around here. Everyone gets sort of absorbed in themselves. Wrapped up in a lot of petty teenage bullshit that's all they have to do these days. Terezi's gone into some great black honking distance he can't be bothered to explore unless she really wanted him to. (And she doesn't. She absolutely, definitely doesn't.) Rose has long since disappeared behind a shimmering veil of alcohol and day glo alien vampires. Karkat's the only part that's not so quiet, and Dave appreciates him for that. Even if what fills the silence is a lot of screaming, or sometimes just a lot of heavy, meaningful sighs. Those are usually the ones accompanied by long glances ceiling-ward, and Dave usually finds a reason to disappear when those start happening. He knows Karkat'll find him via speaker crab before the evening is out.

So some moments he's left alone, wandering with only his own thoughts and the ghosts of half-remembered dreams trailing behind him, whispering in his wake. Something about heat and clockwork, something about the wind and the snow. Shit he barely recalls even on days when he cares to try. He spends a lot of that time writing shitty raps and finding new and paradox space-approved ways to be gleefully ironic. And sometimes he spends that time somewhere else. Times like this, flashstepping still comes in handy. He hasn't had a reason to do it, much, since the end. The Scratch. Man, shit sure did change after that, didn't it? Just not in the way any of them had expected.

For all it gets real quiet, sometimes it takes a whole lot of fucking effort to get to the roof of the lab unaccosted. There's lesbian broads to dodge, and gross sharp shouty honking dumbass asshole aliens everywhere to neatly sidestep. All this effort just to make it up some stairs. He doesn't like to think of it as hiding. More like _efficient upward movement._

But he'll get up to the roof of the lab eventually, and stand up there, quiet, the edges of his cape fluttering in a breeze he can't feel. The whispers get louder up here, dreams hounding him the way dreams can only do when your dreamself is gone, or when bubbles made of the memories of the dead slip and slide in and out of your reality. He likes to ignore them and start pulling equipment out of his sylladex, nodding his head to a beat only he can hear. It's a rhythm based on a certain tone of voice, on a laugh he barely remembers now. Percussion is drawn from the crunch of shoes on fresh snow. The melody is spun from the shivery sigh of the wind through the frozen trees. Harmonizing the main line is a chorus of soft chirps and low croaks. Filling out the sonic range, somewhere in the mid, is a quiet hum. It barely sounds like anything, but without it the song would be empty. [It is the sigh that escapes the world when ice starts to thaw.](http://youtu.be/LApsB9gu0eg)

The instrument sitting on the ground in front of him isn't a mix table. It's a keyboard. A real nice one, with the weighted keys you get on those fancy high end deals you find in the better music stores. He can plug his headphones into it and keep the silence of the roof sacrosanct while still hearing the music all around him. There's no raps to this. There's no lyrics at all. They aren't needed. Not for something like this.

A long time ago, he used to try and write music he thought she'd like. He'd bury the tracks deep down in other mixes, trying to get them lost in collections of other bullshit. Sometimes he wondered if he was trying to get her not to notice, or maybe just divert her attention away. Sometimes he thought maybe it was just his ironic double reacharound commentary on Egbert being a goddamn loser plunking away at that old upright piano. And by loser he actually meant virtuoso, because the kid was actually stunningly good. They all were pretty talented, as it turned out, and when Dave is feeling a little less bitter than usual, he remembers the way he felt trying to thread all their talents together. He'd lay down the bass line - Jade - then add the strings - Rose - then thread the piano line between the two - John - and add in some faint percussive element - himself - and try to bring the whole thing together. Those tracks didn't always work out, and he never sent them to anyone else, though secretly, they were always the ones he liked best. He'd give her tracks that made him think of her and try to blend his style with her tastes and the bassline samples she'd send him in a flurry of bright green shy delight and they usually turned out pretty ok. 

Recapturing that feeling is what's hard now, years later and lifetimes away, lost in the vast dark reaches of god knows fucking where while the girl herself is gone. He remembers her face and her voice and her hand brushing against his jaw, and that's what drives his fingers most of the time. Sometimes he plunks at the keys one by one, idly, the way you might tap on a keyboard when you can't think of what to write but you know you have to write _something_ because this shit is due 8 am tomorrow and if you hand in another assignment late it means a ninja showdown on the roof and you fancy keeping your scalp on. Other times the void around him disappears, consumed in a memory's fall of fluffy cold whiteness blanketing everything in his thoughts, and his hands move across the keys like he was born to play. Those are the days he likes. When he's alone with the music and the memories and everything feels a little bit less fucked up for a little while. God, when did everything get so fucked up. Why is it still so fucked up? He wasn't supposed to live to see all this bizarro bullshit, back when the plan was to go down in a green blaze of glory. Things with Terezi weren't supposed to go so wrong. He wasn't supposed to lose Rose to booze and nightlight vamps. He doesn't hate Kanaya, but he does wonder, sometimes with a vague, sick feeling, what exactly it is the troll sees in his floozy of a sister. Gamzee wasn't supposed to keep happening the way that clown _keeps fucking happening_ , and it's more than once he wonders about Karkat's relative sanity when the guy screams for the six hundred and nine thousandth time about his shitty moirail. Vantas wasn't supposed to become his best buddy, because he already has a best buddy. Well, he did at some point. A couple years ago.

It's been a long time since then.

So he loses himself in the sound. It's easy to lose yourself when you're alone and no one's around to try and find you inside your own head. He loses himself and writes songs no one will ever hear and when something in the infinite ether around him feels slightly wrong, he pulls off his shades and stares around. Reminding himself, every once in a while, what the universe looks like when it isn't tinted in translucent black. But it just looks like the universe, and after a moment he presses the shades back onto his face and bows his head to the music again.

Not once in three years does anyone ever happen upon him up there. Terezi used to try, way back when at the beginning, but he was always a little too quick for her and eventually she gave it up. Karkat's the only one that tries now, and once he even makes it up to the flight of stairs just beneath the roof entrance. But by the time he gets out there, calling Dave's name, the Knight's gone, time-tripping his way out of sight and mind and possibility of capture. Any incriminating evidence disappears with him into the safe obscurity of the bottom of his sylladex. He never did like the thought of being found. Made him feel vulnerable. The raps, sure, why not, he works on those where everybody can see him because everyone should goddamn know what a genius lyric smith he is, forging gold out of shit with the hammer of his wit. But the other stuff, the _musical_ stuff, the stuff like the remixes he used to make way back during simpler times when the itch to be different from his bro would seize him just long enough to wring beauty from his hands, that usually stays hidden and private. He doesn't much like to let anyone know he's writing it. If he did, they'd want to hear. If they heard, they'd want to know. And even if they knew, they might not understand, and they'd want that, too. And it's not even that he doesn't want to explain, though he doesn't. It's that he doesn't know what the answer is either and being lost for words isn't really his gig.

It feels good, though. As he gets older the thoughts he used to shove off - _do this for a living, make my own way, create the footsteps instead of treading in the lines of Bro's_ \- come thicker and faster and get harder to deny. He likes them more, feels the low sting of some weird kind of emotional existential betrayal of Strider ideals less. Maybe someday he'd've done this for real, for the way Dave of Guy would have lived. Maybe he'd have been a real big shot. A star. Making shit the whole country would sit up and notice and think _fuck, that guy's pretty good._

Dave never indulges those thoughts for more than half a minute or three. They get quickly discarded on the sad and tragical pile of Welp That Sure Got Fucked When The Planet Blew Up And We Couldn't Fucking Save It ideas, all of which are placed in the Who Even Cares Anyway Anyone Who'd Want To Hear It Is Dead box to eventually be filed into the drawer marked This Is Stupid, and that drawer is shut in the cabinet labeled Nothing To See Here Move Right Along Sir Or Ma'am It's Not Polite To Stare Didn't Your Momma Teach You Any Manners. Fuck.

Hidden in the pile in the back of the drawer of the filing cabinet of his mind is one small document with his Bro's name on it and nothing more. And he does his level fucking best to lock that thought up tighter than Fort Knox and keep it in the quiet dark forever. The music does a lot of things, moving at his bidding and spinning out of his mind into notes in the air, humming frequencies only he can detect, but it doesn't stop the occasional feeling of wet blood and it doesn't stop the nightmares. At some point he takes lessons from Karkat on how not to sleep and while he bitches and moans the whole time he's secretly sort of grateful, and ashamed of himself for it.

Sometimes - not for long, and only sometimes - it gets real quiet around here.

And when it's quiet, Dave Strider writes music built on dreams of the past that sounds like one single vain hope for the future he doesn't really believe will ever be.


End file.
